Carriers Corral Costs with Asset Management
Insurance Networking News, August 1, 2008
Information technology is inherently polyglot. While none seek complexity for its own sake, an overhead view of any sizable insurance operation will reveal dozens of different types of desktops, servers and networking equipment running various iterations of Windows, Linux and Unix and a dizzying array of packaged and custom software applications.
It is the job of the IT asset manager to step into the breach in order to standardize and streamline this environment. Historically, the emphasis for IT asset management was software asset management undertaken to ensure enough licenses were in place in case of audit by a software vendor. Companies also had a need to be cognizant of what was running in their environment to comply with regulatory statutes such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA. However, more recently, asset management is increasingly being used for strategic and planning purposes.
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At Moncton, New Brunswick-based Medavie Blue Cross, Lynn Barbour took on the task of implementing an asset management regime. Serving all of Eastern Canada, health insurer Medavie has a large, complex IT footprint. It needs one. In addition to serving as its own backbone, the company provides IT services to government organizations such as the Canadian military, which uses Medavie’s system to track insurance for service members. “Our IT infrastructure is the envy of Eastern Canada,” Barbour says, noting that with an IT staff comprising 230, Medavie builds much of its applications in house. “We have application developers, architects and project managers.”
Barbour, formerly Medavie’s corporate technology trainer and, currently, its coordinator of configuration and asset management, convinced upper management to allow her to launch a comprehensive asset management program. She began the undertaking in 2004 by venturing into a closet in the company’s IT department. What she found — a good deal of obsolete hardware and unused programs, some of it dating back a decade—underscored the enormity of the task ahead of her.
Lynn Barbour
Although all the company’s IT infrastructure came under her purview, she decided to first tackle the issue of software compliance on the company’s desktops. Her first step was to create a definitive software library (DSL) of all the applications used within the organization.
After that, Barbour sought a discovery tool to help her audit ongoing software usage and gauge whether any software within the company was unlicensed or underused. She also wanted to identify instances where the company was over-licensed and wasting money by paying for licenses that were not necessary for certain employees. The need to guard against over licensing is especially germane in the instance of software suites, where a given employee may not need all the functionality found in a product, such as Microsoft Office.
While Microsoft makes its own systems management software product—System Center Configuration Manager—for managing large groups of Windows-based computers, Barbour instead selected a point solution from Express Metrix, a Seattle-based maker of IT asset management software. “I rely most heavily on Express Metrix for the bread and butter, asset management portion of my job,” she says, noting the product enables her to generate software usage reports down to the minute and, if need be, to shut down unauthorized or noncompliant programs remotely.
Likewise, Barbour uses two products from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Development Company LP, HP OpenView and HP Systems Insight Manager, to keep an eye on servers. “The whole focus of IT asset management in our perspective is about collecting and analyzing information in a such a way that it facilitates decision making,” says Kris Barker, CEO of Express Metrix.
Barbour’s efforts have earned her the sobriquet “the software police,” and she doesn’t seem to mind. Especially since she was able to show upper management that, within the first few months, her efforts averted $400,000 in possible fines for running unauthorized software. Moreover, by jettisoning licenses for unused software, the company saves approximately another $100,000 per year.
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